Pain

Simone Weil

Cancer causes pain. Growing tumors press against nerves. In March 2020, my tumor broke through the soft tissue lining my throat, creating an ulcer that has never fully healed. This wound is sensitive to heat, acids and spices in food, and even the passage of food particles down my throat. The biological processes mediating pain and inflammation are closely related. That's unfortunate if, like me, you needed radiotherapy to burn out your tumor. The radiation had to pass through damaged tissue -- and inflame it further -- to get to the tumor. 

Analgesics help, and I can lose myself in writing or working out. I can almost forget cancer is there. But pain perseveres, patiently seeking a crack in your defences. Ry Cooder has a beautiful song about how mortgage debt oppresses poor farmers, 

We worked through spring and winter, through summer and through fall.

But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all.

It worked on nights and Sundays, and it worked each holiday.

It settled down among us, and it never went away. ('Taxes on the Farmer,' from Into the Purple Valley, 1972)

Mild but relentless pain will likewise exhaust you.

Pain distorts how you perceive things. You misread a friend's hesitation as a slight. You interpret your spouse’s distraction when you ask for help is interpreted as a complaint. Pain signals danger, and even when it is not at the forefront of your thoughts, it occupies a fraction of your mind. If only unconsciously, your body focuses on how to avoid stabs and burns. Pain gives you tunnel vision; you have less attention to focus outside yourself. Pain makes you stupid and drives you into a darkened corner.

Pain is the herald of death. As cancer progresses, the intensity increases. If we can't kill the tumor, the pain will only get worse until I die. I've been spared severe nausea or loss of organ function other than my tongue and throat. However, pain of varying intensity has been with me since March 2020. Right now, it's bearable but growing again. 

What can you do? You can stare down pain and death, disdaining tears. This is the counsel of Achilles. Ecstatic with rage, remorseless as cancer, and utterly without illusions, he rampages through the Trojan ranks. Before Achilles slays Lycaon, he scolds him,

Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life a deathless godless. But even for me, I tell you, death and the strong force of fate are waiting. (Illiad, Book 21, Fagles translation.)

Perhaps some of Achilles' victims faced him without cowering. In a way, they had it easy because he struck quickly. Cancer takes its time; how long can bare courage last? If cancer is incurable, the pain will win; how can you withstand it? 

Simone Weil wrote that

Affliction is the uprooting of life, a more or less protracted equivalent to death, rendered irresistibly present in the soul by impairment or the immediate apprehension of physical agony. (Awaiting God (pp. 31-32). Fresh Wind Press.)

If your cancer is incurable, what can you hope for? Weil found the presence of the living God, encountering Christ in 1938 in an abbey church in northern France.

Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512-1516.

Weil did not thereby escape from suffering. Luther taught, correctly, that God reveals God's self in suffering; Weil saw that creation was infinite in both beauty and sorrow:

[T]he one whose soul remains oriented toward God while being pierced by the nail finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center—not in the middle—it is outside space and time; it is God. (Awaiting God (pp. 44-46))

That's all the hope there is; deal with it.